A Cat Tells Two Tales (19 page)

14

Basillio laughed so hard that he almost fell off his swivel chair.

“You mean all our undercover work has revealed the astonishing fact that three goddamn white cats are missing?”

We were in his office in the back of the copying store. We could hear the copy machines whirring. We could see the customers clutching their papers.

I let him laugh. Until that very morning I had thought it funny also, from time to time. Well, not really funny, but like something from Mother Goose. But then I had begun to think carefully . . . to think about Bruce Chessler.

“No, we found out a bit more,” I said.

“What?” he retorted. “That he hated his grandmother and in fact all Russian émigrés from the Moscow Art Theatre? That the kid had an arrested adolescence? That he was another pathetic out-of-work actor living on egotistical fantasies? That he was a speed freak? Yeah, I guess you did find out a lot.”

His last line was thrown away with excruciating sarcasm.

“Everything you’re saying now, Tony, I thought yesterday when I got back. But there is another way to look at it, a way that could very well mean the NYPD doesn’t know what it is talking about.”

He leaned forward, the sarcasm gone. He began to tap a staccato beat on the desk. He was very interested but he wanted to retain his cool. That was Tony. I found myself looking at him suddenly with enormous affection. Why hadn’t Tony and I ever slept together? Why hadn’t we become lovers? He was a dear, sad, crazy, talented man. So what if he was married? Why hadn’t I taken that final step? I was very lonely. I knew there was no promise of love unless one initiated it . . . unless one fought for it. Was I happy with my career as a priestess of avant-garde theater? It was profoundly fake. There were few plays and fewer parts that interested me. My cats indeed were beloved by me, but even they could not fill the widening hole in my life. What was the matter with me? He was there . . . willing . . . eager . . . waiting. To him I was always beautiful, cryptic, intelligent—his erotic theatrical fantasy. Why not?

Then I pushed all that nonsense out of my head. I could think about it later. Now there was work to do.

“I now think, Tony, that Bruce Chessler knew he was going to die.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“Not really. Follow me carefully on this. Try to look at it the way his grandmother used to look at character development in a role. Remember? The part is within you, no matter how different the role is from yourself. It will come out real only if your emotions are real.”

“Shit, Swede, is this a Method class in how to play Bruce Chessler?”

“Sort of, Tony. Bear with me. Suppose you had a dog . . . a much-loved dog.”

“Okay.”

“Now, under what circumstances would you give your dog away?”

“None.”

“What about if you lost your job?”

“No.”

“If you got kicked out of your apartment?”

“No.”

“If you were sick?”

“No, Swede, under no circumstances.”

“Except one.”

“Which is?”

“If you knew you were going to die.”

“Well, that’s about the only one.”

“Right. So I think, Tony, that Bruce Chessler knew he was going to die, so he gave his cats away.”

Basillio got off his chair and began to pace, peering out toward the machines from time to time as if to let his employees know that while he was indeed entertaining a tall handsome woman in his office, he, the entrepreneurial genius behind Mother Courage Copying Shop, was on the case.

Then he patted me on the head in a humorously patronizing manner, as if I were a gifted child who was also a disciplinary problem. Then he sat back down in his swivel chair.

“So what else is new, Swede?”

“There’s more, Tony. It is because he felt he was going to die that he was able to confess his love for me. Before then, he could only write letters that he could not mail.”

“Look, Swede, what you’re saying is possible. But only barely possible. And, if so, so what? Maybe he had screwed some drug supplier and knew he was going to get shot.”

“Then why would he show up for the meeting? No, Tony, that doesn’t wash. From all accounts of the murder, there was an amicable meeting in the bar, then a sudden argument, and then shots fired. He didn’t go to the bar that night thinking a drug supplier was going to murder him.”

“Then who did he think was going to abort his short, glorious life, Swede?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I admitted.

“So what do we do?”

“Well, first of all, we have to track down or understand his pet hates . . . or at least the hates his girlfriend identified.”

“Which are?”

“His grandmother.”

“Who’s dead.”

“Right. And three of her émigré colleagues. The girl Risa mentioned Bukai, Chederov, and Mallinova.”

He repeated the names like they were lyrics of a song.

“I thought maybe, Tony, you could take the afternoon off tomorrow and come with me to the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts.”

“Why not, Swede? What else do successful businessmen have to do on afternoons other than manufacture erotic fantasies?”

“Bless you, Tony,” I said, kissing him lightly on the cheek before I walked out. My legs were trembling and I had a ferocious desire to brush my long hair.

We met by the pool with the Henry Moore sculpture—in front of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center. Basillio stretched out languorously on one of the stone benches.

“I think we should go in and get to work,” I said.

“There’s time,” he replied.

He kept refusing to go in and I kept getting more and more impatient, more and more nudging.

“Well, you might as well know the truth, Swede; I am enjoying sitting here because it is on this very bench that yours truly, Anthony Basillio, stage designer par excellence, theatrical philosopher, Brechtian scholar—it was right here in either 1976 or 1977 that I gave up theater and became a goddamn capitalist.”

“I thought people gave up the theater in bars.”

“How would you know, Swede? You never gave it up,” he retorted happily; then he swung his feet over the side and we walked into the library, which specializes in theater, film, dance, music, and allied fields.

Within a half hour after entering, we had requisitioned an entire table and piled it high with sources—collections of theatrical reviews bound and unbound . . . biographical directories of theater people . . . histories of the New York theater and the Russian theater and the world theater.

What we found was this. Lev Bukai, Nikolai Chederov, and Pyotr Mallinova were all members of the Moscow Art Theatre up to the 1920s, when they all, at one time or another, left Moscow and went into exile. They all ended up eventually in New York by the late 1940s, where their colleague Maria Swoboda was living and was about to become a respected drama coach because of her association with Stanislavski and his Method.

In the late 1950s they all banded together to form a repertory company—the Nikolai Group—which would continue the tradition of the Moscow Art Theatre. Bukai and Chederov were the directors. Mallinova, the producer. Maria Swoboda was on the board and played many character roles. The group traveled throughout the world and was much acclaimed. Its last production in New York was in 1967—Gogol’s
The Inspector General
—and then it disbanded.

So there it was for what it was worth. We gathered the books and directories and clippings and brought them back to their respective shelves and desks.

Then Basillio and I walked across the street to O’Neal’s Balloon and had drinks.

“So what happens now?” he asked as he played with the large, almost grotesque piece of celery jutting out of his Bloody Mary.

I didn’t really know “what happens now,” as Basillio put it. The visit to the library had obviously been successful—information-wise. But it had opened up a whole other can of heuristic worms. The oddity of the situation became acute. How and why would a young actor like Bruce Chessler have a contempt for and hatred of people like Bukai, Chederov, Mallinova? It didn’t figure. Young actors always hate people who “sell out,” who go Hollywood—they hate the hustlers and liars and frauds who seem to infest the theater in all cultures and at all times.

But they rarely hate people like the Russian émigrés from the Moscow Art Theatre. These people were truly dedicated, truly important, truly persecuted. These people have always been considered the very best of what the theater had to offer in modern times.

They had been through the whirlwind. They had studied and worked and suffered and triumphed with the great Stanislavski. They were theater people par excellence.

“I think,” I said to Basillio, “I’m going to pay a visit to Lev Bukai.”

“Why him?”

“Why not?”

“I mean, why not the others?”

“Them too. But first I think I’ll pay a visit to Bukai. After all, he was probably the most famous of the émigrés and he was a director of the Nikolai Group—whatever that was.”

“Do you want me along?”

“No. Not for the first one. Maybe later.”

He pulled the celery stalk out of his Bloody Mary and made as if to fling it across the bar.

“Tony!” I censored him quickly and strongly, then realized he was not going to do it—only faking the throw.

“Still a middle-class schoolmarm at heart, huh, Swede?” he taunted, and I felt stupid.

“That’s because no matter how old you get, Tony, you still don’t know how to be around women . . . you still must act the difficult child.”

“But not as difficult as Bruce Chessler,” he noted in response, and suddenly a gloom seemed to descend from the walls and the ceiling and wrap me in despondence. Tony placed a gentle brotherly arm around my shoulder and I let him keep it there.

15

It was very difficult to believe that Lev Bukai lived here. I was standing in front of a magnificent old white-stone building on Ninety-fourth Street just east of Fifth Avenue—the Carnegie Hill section of Manhattan. Where had he gotten all the money to obtain it? The original front had been demolished and replaced with a brick wall and a large burnished oak door that opened directly onto the street. It was as if the new owner had decided to build a monastery and then thought better of it. Or maybe after he had moved into the posh neighborhood he realized a monastery wasn’t necessary because two blocks away was the main headquarters of the Russian Orthodox persuasion in North America, which housed, among others, the exiled patriarch. Even I knew that, and I’m not Russian Orthodox.

A young woman in a smock answered the door quickly when I twisted the elaborate ringer.

“May I see Lev Bukai?” I asked.

“Who are you?” she countered, obviously not used to having people show up at the front door. She looked like an art-school teacher. Her hair was pulled back severely.

“An old student of Madame Swoboda’s,” I answered, thinking that it was my connection with the old teacher that would guarantee me an audience. I also made a point of lapsing into the deferential dialect that all the émigrés seemed to require in the student-teacher relationship. One should always, at least metaphorically, bow one’s head to one’s teacher.

I was right. The name Maria Swoboda was the key. The woman left me at the door with a hushed gesture and returned a minute later, ushering me in.

The place was like a vengeful mausoleum. Huge pieces of old dark furniture soaked up the summer light and seemed to convert it immediately to heat. It felt like it was about two hundred degrees.

Lev Bukai was sitting in what appeared to be a study, although there were no bookcases and the literally thousands of books in the room were piled up on what seemed to be folding tables. Many paintings hung without any sense of balance or composition on the wall. They were portraits of people I didn’t know or didn’t recognize, done in a heroic style—arms crossed, legs thrust out and apart, jaws jutting, tunics only half buttoned. And the women were all in languorous poses with enormous heads of brilliant hair.

Lev Bukai looked me up and down. I smiled. He still had that director’s eye. He was a tiny, twisted gnome of a man, hidden in a terry-cloth robe. A glass of tea was in his lap. There was no fan or air conditioner in the room.

His nose and ears were bulbous and one eye was partially closed. His blotch-marked skin seemed to have been stretched tight against the bones as if by a machine.

“So, you knew Maria Swoboda.”

“Years ago,” I said. I wasn’t nervous. But I was frightened by him . . . by the tradition he incarnated. It was, in a sense, like being about to interrogate a Buddha. I realized that I should have brought Basillio. And for the first time in a long while I was very conscious of my dress. I had put on a long skirt with a long-sleeved black cotton jersey. Like a drama student, I realized shamefacedly.

“You were student of hers?”

“Yes.”

He grinned, one of those arrogant Russian-émigré grins that say no one from Minnesota will ever understand what they are all talking about.

“She is dead,” he noted, running an arthritic hand through what remained of his brushed-back white hair.

“Yes, I know, and I appreciate your seeing me—but it’s not about her that I came to see you.”

“A part? You want a part?” He laughed uproariously at his own joke.

Then he added: “But I am no longer in theater. I’m country gentleman now. Like Oblomov.” And he laughed again and then began to cough and choke and wheeze.

Did he really believe that he was in the country? It was a possibility, I thought.

“I want to talk with you, Mr. Bukai, about her grandson.”

“Whose grandson?”

“Maria Swoboda’s grandson.”

He stared at me from beneath a lowered head and sipped the tea in his glass. For the first time since I had entered his home I really felt the power of the old guard—tea from a samovar, dark and pungent, not from a tea bag. This tiny arthritic eighty-five-year-old man in front of me had more theater in one toe than I had in my whole body. And above all, he was European theater in all of its glory and excesses and wanderings and abortions. I remembered how I was literally speechless the first time I met Maria Swoboda—so many years ago. The towering ghost of Stanislavski covered them all like a mantle.

“I don’t know that she had grandson,” Bukai said. It was obvious he was not going to ask me to sit.

“But surely she must have told you . . . or showed you a picture of him. His name was Bruce Chessler.”

“No.”

“Did she never speak about him?”

“No. Never.”

“And no one else spoke of him?”

“No.”

“But she had a grandson,” I said to him, frustrated. The back of my jersey was now clinging wetly to my skin.

He nodded his head as if everything were possible and then went back to his tea. I waited. He said nothing. He stopped looking at me. “Please!” I suddenly blurted out. My plea seemed to infuriate him. He lifted a small table with one straining hand and let it smack into the floor. The young woman was instantly in the room. She stared at me threateningly. Then she ushered me out without another word. The door was slammed behind me.

It was eleven thirty in the morning. My next stop was Nikolai Chederov. He lived on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street in a magnificent landmark apartment house. The doorman wouldn’t let me in. He called Chederov on the lobby phone. I shouted into the receiver that I wanted to talk to him about Maria Swoboda’s grandson—Bruce Chessler. He said in a very loud voice: “Who?” I repeated myself. “Don’t know,” he yelled. Then: “You crazy! Go away!” And he hung up. The doorman escorted me out.

Pyotr Mallinova, unlike Bukai and Chederov, had only his phone listed in the phone book—no address. This was odd, because émigrés are always obsessive about listing their full and correct and current names, addresses, and phone numbers in any and every source they can, because one never knows when old friends will suddenly pop up and look for them.

Anyway, I called him from a phone booth on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, right in front of Carnegie Hall. I let the phone ring a long, long time. No one answered. I called a half hour later. Then another half hour later. I then began to call every fifteen minutes until I met Basillio, as planned, in a coffee shop in the Village.

Once, during the calls, someone picked up the phone, listened, then hung up.

“I contacted Bukai and Chederov,” I told Basillio when we were seated and served, “and neither of them claimed to know anything about Bruce Chessler, much less confirm his existence. Mallinova, I couldn’t contact.”

“Do you believe them?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“Where does this all leave you now? I mean, your theory that Chessler knew he was going to die and that it was something involved with his hatred for those people that did him in rather than a bad drug deal.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. It was just something to follow up. Like his connection with Arkavy Reynolds. It was just something unique—a young man’s bitter hatred for some old people. Don’t you think it should have been followed up?” I asked him somewhat tartly.

He grinned and bent over his cup and blew some foam from the top of his cappuccino by way of an answer.

“And I’m glad I followed up, because there is something very strange about these Russians.”

“What? That they’re still alive?”

“Their wealth, I mean. Where did they get the money to live the way they do? They were émigré actors, directors, producers. They were starving like all the others. They never made it to Hollywood like the Germans. Maria Swoboda never seemed to have a dime.”

“Swede, that kind of stuff is very hard to find out.”

“Why?”

“Remember when we were in the library? The biographical directories don’t give information on finances. They tell you about their careers . . . where born . . . where educated . . . who married. That’s it.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Call their accountants.”

“Very funny.”

“There probably is a way.”

“How?”

“Get someone who really knows these people.”

“These people are in their eighties and nineties.”

“I mean someone who knows their history, their ties to Stanislavski. I mean someone who knows how they grew and splintered and scattered.”

“Fine in theory, Tony, but I don’t know anyone like that.”

He cocked his head in his infuriating fashion and said slyly: “Oh, yes you do, Swede.”

“Don’t tell me who I know,” I replied angrily. He was beginning to annoy me again. How had I ever contemplated sleeping with him?

“Joseph Grablewski,” he said slyly.

I don’t know what I looked like at that moment, but I do know that I felt like the blood had drained from my body.

It was a very special, very fearful name from the past.

Grablewski had been one of the bright-shining stars of theatrical criticism in the early 1970s. He used to lecture at the Dramatic Workshop when Basillio and I attended, and I had fallen wildly, crazily in love with him.

And I had done about everything I could think of to get him interested—from the subtle to the exhibitionistic—but he wasn’t. It didn’t happen.

I could visualize him easily—corduroy jacket, ridiculous tie, face like a large bird’s—a hawk or a falcon—and that enormous shock of black-gray hair.

And I could remember that intense, quiet, enfolding, mind-bending way of talking that swept you up into his way of thinking . . . that made you want to think. . . .

He had been a mesmerizing intellectual. He talked about the theater like no one I had ever heard talk about it before. He, above all, had been the reason I decided to cast my lot with the concept of an avant-garde . . . with a concept that no longer existed. He, above all, was the reason I was still supporting myself by cat-sitting at age forty-one—because I simply could not put my art and craft, my brain and heart, at the service of a popular culture I loathed. Or, to put it another way, he had activated my intellectual and theatrical arrogance. I wanted to be immortal—not a movie actress. Grablewski had loved the Russians and their Moscow Art Theatre and all theaters caught up in revolutions—real and imagined—and he taught us to love them.

I had been desperately in love with him, and his ignoring me was, at the time, an enormous tragedy . . . it made me fearful for my life . . . it shattered my sexual self-confidence. Men had always desired me. Why not him?

All I could say in response to Basillio was: “Is he still alive?”

“Alive and crazy and still holding court in that bar on Forty-fourth Street.”

“He must be an old man by now,” I said.

Basillio grinned at me in response. “Not all that old. And even if he’s ninety—so what? If anyone can tell you about secret things in the lives of Bukai, Chederov, and Mallinova, it’s him. Right?”

It was nine o’clock that evening. I was standing, believe it or not, in the Forty-fourth Street bar, west of Eighth Avenue, staring through the dim light at the man who sat in a far booth—Joseph Grablewski.

He didn’t look much different. His hair was still thick and wild, although all white. He wore the same kind of clothes. He emanated the same kind of nervous energy. And he was drinking the same thing—vodka.

But where were the young people? The actors, actresses, designers, students who used to throng about him? Was he talking to himself now? Was he still talking? What kind of hole had he been in all these years? Why had he become anonymous?

I started walking toward him.

Halfway there, he saw me and began to sing, sardonically: “There she is . . . Miss America.”

Suddenly weak, I slid into the booth across from him. His stupid sarcastic song brought back a thousand conflicting memories. My head was like a deranged projector.

He smiled at me. His face, up close, had indeed changed—broken down and weary. But the form, the frame, was ageless.

“Do you remember me?” I asked very quickly. I was still shaking a bit.

“Oh, yes . . . oh, yes,” he said, leaning back and clasping his hands behind his head as if he were about to make an academic point.

He described his remembering: “The Dramatic Workshop. Many years ago. There she is . . . Miss America. Vaguely beautiful. Vaguely committed. Vaguely talented. Vaguely, vaguely, vaguely.”

“Well,” I retorted bitterly, “it is better than always being vaguely drunk.”

His eyes sparked anger. Then contempt. For whom? Himself? Me? Then he relaxed.

“And you have come to see me because you want to know what happened to the theatrical lion. What happened to my worldview. To my criticism. Where are the books? Where are the productions? Where are the insights which dazzle and dazzle?”

“Perhaps.” The bar was like a tired, seedy cathedral.

“I became enlightened,” he said.

I looked at his vodka glass and at the table in the booth, which seemed not to have been wiped in a decade. I was making a silent point.